The Tom Petty Project

Today’s episode is a fantastic chat I had with my friend Eric Senich, who has been on the show previously, back in October of last year. As well as being an outstanding podcaster and rock historian, …

Rich is back to share his answers to my 10 questions? He's in cover bands that deal with Tom, Jeff Lynne, and George Harrison's musical output, so that question is a slam dunk, right? Which gig will …

Today’s episode is a fan chat with a musician who’s be following along with the podcast for a while now and is a fellow Northern Englishman. Rich Gibson is a singer, songwriter, and musician as a sol…

Well, we've covered all the songs on Echo now, so that can only mean one thing! That's right. It's time for John Paulsen to join me again to wrap up the twelfth album and dig into the vinyl age, whet…

“One more night, God I've had to fight. To keep my line of sight on what's real”. That opening line really acts as a double underline on the pain and weariness that Tom has explored lyrically through…

Wolfie is back to answer my ten "quick fire" questions, which seem to be taking longer and longer! His pick for favourite Heartbreaker came as a surprise but his three words to describe Tom Petty are…

Today’s episode is a fan chat with a musician and podcaster who I’ve gotten to know a little over the last 12 months or so and wanted to learn more about. Greg Wolfe, or Wolfie as he’s more commonly …

There’s a weight to the arrangement of this song, accentuated by that heavy kick pattern that Steve Ferrone opts for, along with Tom’s deliberate persistence in landing on the root note at the end of…

Welcome to a special episode of the Tom Petty Project where I’m going to take a break from our usual scheduling to pay tribute to one of the most influential performers of all time. I am your host an…

It’s often been remarked that Mike sometimes sounds like Tom when he sings. If you listen to the Dirty Knobs albums you do hear some of those inflections peeking out from time to time, as you’d expec…

"Pharmacists aren't here to save rock and roll. They don't have the budget, or the jackets. But they are *trying*, in a landscape where most bands are too busy refreshing their socials to finish a br…

It’s an affirmation that after thinking about this problem, there’s a conviction to follow an ideal, if not a known direction yet. Whatever the direction we end up taking, it has to be something that…

 I think this is a perfectly neat, tidy, compact, fun little bouncy piece of music, with a nicely constructed, easy to remember lyric. The problem is, this one has always felt to me like Tom could cr…

It’s interesting that Mike has never dusted this one off with the Dirty Knobs and I think this goes back to him talking about how difficult a period this was and given the circumstances around its co…

OK, let’s get into the song! In Conversations with Tom Petty, Tom tells author Paul Zollo “I wrote that on the drive to the studio in Bugs’ truck. My trusty roadie Bugs was driving me to work—and I g…

Today’s episode is a very focused conversation I had with my pal and previous guest Nic Apostoleries. When we chatted way back in 2022, Nic told me that when I reached Echo, that he’d love to come on…

I’d said in the closing to last week’s episode that I get a strong connection between this song and the Jeff Lynne era of Tom’s work. So, close your eyes, listen to the first four bars, and imagine c…

This is a very grown up song and as we discussed on Wildflowers, it’s a song that wouldn’t resonate as much with a person in their teens or early twenties as it would with someone who has lived and l…

In Conversations with Tom Petty, author Paul Zollo tells Tom that he finds the song has “kind of a British, early Beatles sound” to which to Tom replies “Yeah. It’s funny how you see these influences…

Lyrically, we get this short story, in typical Tom fashion where he’s just giving us the outlines and parts of a narrative. We start out standing by the highway in boots and silver spurs. And we end …